Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, 2nd Ed

I bought both editions of this book because there are so many different contents it was worth it to get many primary sources easily. Source books help us learn which books are worth buying because we can discover what we like from a sample.

This is a required textbook for my Chinese Civilization class and it is the best out of all the readings for that class. It is a textbook full of interesting stories from people who lived in the past. If you are buying this for your class I can assure you the reading material is better than a regular history textbook.

Decent Book but Boring.

New

I am not a huge fan of Chinese history, so I can't tell you if you will like this book from that perspective. However, I am a college student that had to write a ten page history paper on China. I bought this book because I needed primary sources that covered foreign relations in China during certain dynasties. I was very pleased to find many useful sources for my paper, and I can tell that there are many more useful sources for other categories of Chinese history.So basically, if you frequently find yourself in situations that require you to quote and cite historical Chinese documents, this is probably a good book to add to your library. I know that I will keep this book for a long time, because I have another Chinese history class in the Fall :)

SchoolJust what I ordered

good

Just what I needed for class. Easy to follow for the most part and able to get what I needed out of it!

Como antología de textos para tener acceso a fuentes en un idioma de difícil adquisición, como es el chino, es muy recomemdable y bastante completo. Se solapa en bastantes textos con Sources of Chinese Tradition de la Columbia U., más completo, pero en cualquier caso son fuentes en gran parte complementarias y en conjunto permiten el estudio a quienes no dominan el chino de las fuentes.Sería deseable poner algo así en castellano, traducido del chino, como ya se ha hecho para fuentes de la fiosofía japonesa en Herder.

For a long time I was struggling to find books that could help my Western friends have an authentic, comprehensive and unfiltered understanding of Chinese culture, society and history. This is by far the one and only book I recommended to my families and friends. Living in North America for years, I’m still often astonished by people’s lack of any BASIC level of understanding of China...Most people know nothing about this nation and culture with a history of 5000 years. Pathetically, the medias keep feeding public’s innocence and bias, instead of providing the authentic and whole vision. Hope more people get to read it.

This is an awesome book. Very well organized and full of useful information.

The book is very well balanced history of Chinese Civilisation, from an expert on the subject. It is a suplementary companion to her other important book, Cambridge Illustrated History of China.The book was pre-used and the cover wears a more aged look than the usual pre-used books I buy. But it had no markings inside, or no dog eared pages.Needed it for study reference, at a cheap price, no can't complain.